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Saturday, July 21, 2012

TROLLQAIDA: The US's new way of fighting terror

TROLLQAIDA: The US's new way of fighting terror

US’s new plan to fight terror involves online trolling Plan is to undermine, shame and humiliate terrorists If you see words like “LAME” – it’s probably the CIA

AFTER
years of trying to win over hearts and minds in the field, the US State
Department has a new tactic in the war on terror – trolling.

A
Silicon Valley dot com veteran now working for the Government has
launched a program called “Viral Peace” which aims to occupy online
terror sites and shame, humiliate and annoy fundamentalists, Wired
reports.

State Department senior technology adviser Shahed
Amanullah told the magazine he wanted to use “logic, humour, satire,
[and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to
undermine and demoralize them”.

Presumably this will involve
infiltrating comment threads with lots of comments like “LAME” “You call
yourselves a terrorist?”, flame wars and pedobears.

Mr Amanullah
said rather than trying to censor or take down these extremist
websites, a better strategy would be to undermine the macho element so
heavily promoted across them.

“Online extremists have an energy,” he said. “They’ve got a vitality that frankly attracts some of these at-risk people.

“It appeals to macho, it appeals to people’s rebellious nature, it appeals to people who feel downtrodden.”

The
aim of the program is to train trolls internationally and let them do
the work in their own languages and cultures.(And attack any group the
Governemt doesnt like as they have been doing for years as most here
know)

“I want to prove you can do small, inexpensive, high-impact
projects that don’t just talk about the problem but solve the problem,”
Mr Amanullah said. “And solve it the right way: not with the
government’s heavy hand but by empowering local people to do what they
already know to do but don’t know how.”

Leading jihad researcher
Jarret Brachman agreed with this tactic, calling the people who post on
the forums “massive narcissists who need constant ego boosts”.

In
the decade since 9/11, the U.S. government has used a wide variety of
tactics against terrorists. It’s invaded countries where they operated
(and ones where they didn’t). It’s tried to win the backing of foreign
populations in which the terrorists hide. And it’s sent commandos and
deadly flying robots to kill them one by one.

One thing it hasn’t done, until now: troll them.

Within
the State Department, a Silicon Valley veteran has quietly launched an
improbable new initiative to annoy, frustrate and humiliate denizens of
online extremist forums. It’s so new that it hasn’t fully taken shape:
Even its architects concede it hasn’t fleshed out an actual strategy
yet, and accordingly can’t point to any results it’s yielded. Its annual
budget is a rounding error. The Pentagon will spend more in Afghanistan
in the time it takes you to finish reading this sentence.

But it
also represents, in the mind of its creator, a chance to discourage
impressionable youth from becoming terrorists — all in an idiom they
firmly understand. And if it actually works, it might stand a chance of
cutting off al-Qaida’s ability to replenish its ranks at a time when it
looks to be reeling.

The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to
occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter
exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the
State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants
to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to
confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of
it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.